Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

Valletta · Jun 27, 2026

Chevalier, daughter of Dominican immigrants, grew up in Miami and came to the city 14 years ago to attend Columbia University.
Described in her Justice Democrats online profile as an “a working-class Afro-Latina organizer,” her policies appear more a product of her Ivy League education than immersion in the daily life of NY-13.
She opposes all forms of deportation, detention, and imprisonment, and has called for the abolishment of ICE, universal basic income, a cancellation of student loans, and Medicare for All, including gender affirming care.

Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

“There’s just very little known about her,” one voter said. “She didn’t have very much of a track record or any real roots in the neighborhood, so who knows?”

nypost.com

Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

comana · Jun 27, 2026

In summary: voters whose candidate lost are complaining that the candidate who got more votes won.

Pommer · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Chevalier, daughter of Dominican immigrants, grew up in Miami and came to the city 14 years ago to attend Columbia University.
Described in her Justice Democrats online profile as an “a working-class Afro-Latina organizer,” her policies appear more a product of her Ivy League education than immersion in the daily life of NY-13.
She opposes all forms of deportation, detention, and imprisonment, and has called for the abolishment of ICE, universal basic income, a cancellation of student loans, and Medicare for All, including gender affirming care.

Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

“There’s just very little known about her,” one voter said. “She didn’t have very much of a track record or any real roots in the neighborhood, so who knows?”

nypost.com

Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

Her choice of “Ivy League” school was Columbia, which is mere blocks from her area of expertise/activism and actually located in the District she’s running for.

Tuur · Jun 27, 2026

I was going to go with voters getting exactly what they wanted.

Valletta · Jun 27, 2026

Pommer said:
Her choice of “Ivy League” school was Columbia, which is mere blocks from her area of expertise/activism and actually located in the District she’s running for.

Some neighborhood people obviously feel like an Ivy League college and elite socialist activism is not in touch with community roots. I know the leaders keep upping the dates of the primaries to lessen voter turnout but Democrats need to get out and vote.

comana · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Some neighborhood people obviously feel like an Ivy League college and elite socialist activism is not in touch with community roots. I know the leaders keep upping the dates of the primaries to lessen voter turnout but Democrats need to get out and vote.

Voter apathy for primaries is nothing new, but it’s clear that the winning candidate generated more excitement than the incumbent.

DaisyDay · Jun 27, 2026

NYT: Who Is Darializa Avila Chevalier?

Ms. Avila Chevalier pulled off one of the biggest upsets in a New York House primary since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joseph Crowley in 2018.

She’s a first-time candidate.
...This campaign was her first formal foray into politics. She is a Ph.D. student and an investigator in a public defender office, while she previously helped lead protests against the Israel-Hamas war at Columbia University.
She was strongly backed by the Democratic Socialists.
Ms. Avila Chevalier was a more left-wing candidate than her opponent, having voiced support for abolishing the police, borders and prisons and seizing property from landlords.

She was also supported by Justice Democrats, a left-wing group, which recruited her to run. The group funneled close to $300,000 to Ms. Avila Chevalier’s campaign and was an influential supporter of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign.
She was involved in protests at Columbia.
She was the target of racist attacks.
Over the course of Ms. Avila Chevalier’s campaign, she faced racist attacks questioning her fidelity to her Dominican heritage. Ms. Avila Chevalier’s parents are both immigrants from the Dominican Republic, but some supporters of Mr. Espaillat, the first Dominican American elected to Congress, falsely claimed that she is of Haitian descent.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola and have a long and complicated history marked by an occupation of the entire island by the Haitians and a massacre of Haitians by Rafael Trujillo, who was the Dominican dictator for decades
Her social media posts caused a firestorm.

We'll see if she wins in November.

ThatRobGuy · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Chevalier, daughter of Dominican immigrants, grew up in Miami and came to the city 14 years ago to attend Columbia University.
Described in her Justice Democrats online profile as an “a working-class Afro-Latina organizer,” her policies appear more a product of her Ivy League education than immersion in the daily life of NY-13.
She opposes all forms of deportation, detention, and imprisonment, and has called for the abolishment of ICE, universal basic income, a cancellation of student loans, and Medicare for All, including gender affirming care.

Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

“There’s just very little known about her,” one voter said. “She didn’t have very much of a track record or any real roots in the neighborhood, so who knows?”

nypost.com

Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

There's that old saying:

"Democracy is the idea that voters know exactly what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard"

The issue we have right now is that nobody ever has to really get the full brunt of that last part when some of these things are being tried at a city level. They still have two levels of government (state and federal) to bail them out when the experiment fails.

There's pros and cons with that.

While on one hand it's nice to know that a mayor presiding over the de facto seat of the US economic sector can't accidentally burn the whole place to the ground, on the other hand, it prolongs the amount of time we have to keep having this silly "well, real socialism hasn't been tried before" conversation with people whose recollection of history seems to omit Eastern Europe from 1950-1990.

I'd liken it to a kid wanting to touch a hot stove.

The protective instinct of an adult in the room prevents them from actually touching it and burning themselves. However, that protective instinct prevents them from getting the most quick, efficient lesson (that won't soon be forgotten) about precisely why they shouldn't be touching it.

Pommer · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Some neighborhood people obviously feel like an Ivy League college and elite socialist activism is not in touch with community roots. I know the leaders keep upping the dates of the primaries to lessen voter turnout but Democrats need to get out and vote.

Why is it that educated up-and-coming politicians are “bad”?

ThatRobGuy · Jun 27, 2026

Pommer said:
Why is it that educated up-and-coming politicians are “bad”?

Depends on what they're educated in.

More and more, "being educated" (meaning "went to college and got a fancy-sounding degree in the humanities") is becoming synonymous with being "out of touch with reality".

And it's not a completely unfair characterization (albeit exaggerated a bit by conservative pundits).

If younger people are coming out of universities heavily indoctrinated with various forms of "theory", and relatively little in terms of how the real world operates, then this clip from "Back to School" highlights the gap.

Bradskii · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Chevalier, daughter of Dominican immigrants, grew up in Miami and came to the city 14 years ago to attend Columbia University.
Described in her Justice Democrats online profile as an “a working-class Afro-Latina organizer,” her policies appear more a product of her Ivy League education than immersion in the daily life of NY-13.
She opposes all forms of deportation, detention, and imprisonment, and has called for the abolishment of ICE, universal basic income, a cancellation of student loans, and Medicare for All, including gender affirming care.

Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

“There’s just very little known about her,” one voter said. “She didn’t have very much of a track record or any real roots in the neighborhood, so who knows?”

nypost.com

Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

Democracy: A system of government where eligible citizens vote for those they wish to represent them. Generally accepted by the voters with the ocassional complaint from some who disagree with the result.

camille70 · Jun 27, 2026

I don't like her. This was a small turnout election and I'm not sure some of her more extreme views were well known beforehand. I think the demographics showed young folk under 30 voted her in. There are multiple clips of her saying if an undocumented immigrant commits a crime that it's double jeopardy to deport them after they serve their sentence. Uh...no. Two different crimes. No one seems to be pushing back and the one time I saw someone attempt to it was bad optics. She's very soft spoken so it came across as the men bullying her. They need a woman to go toe to toe with her. I've seen speculation that a dem might run third party/ independent to thwart her.

Servus · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

Unfortunately that's probably the case.

Tuur · Jun 27, 2026

DaisyDay said:
We'll see if she wins in November.

A quick check shows that NY 13th District has voted overwhelmingly Democrat for representatives since 2018. Odds favor her election in November.

NxNW · Jun 27, 2026

Tuur said:
I was going to go with voters getting exactly what they wanted.

Apparently some voters are happy being defeated by Iran and algea in the same week.

NxNW · Jun 27, 2026

ThatRobGuy said:
If younger people are coming out of universities heavily indoctrinated with various forms of "theory", and relatively little in terms of how the real world operates, then this clip from "Back to School" highlights the gap.

A freshman in that comedy movie from 1986 would be 58 now.

I don't think it really supports your point about "younger people".

NxNW · Jun 27, 2026

Valletta said:
Perhaps some of these areas have to hit rock bottom in order to bring back common sense.

But enough about the 2024 presidential election.

Pommer · Jun 27, 2026

ThatRobGuy said:
Depends on what they're educated in.

Their BA from Columbia is for Middle-Eastern Studies; they’re attending CUNY as a doctrinal student in sociology, what a silly field for a budding politician.

ThatRobGuy said:
More and more, "being educated" (meaning "went to college and got a fancy-sounding degree in the humanities") is becoming synonymous with being "out of touch with reality".

You might even believe that, yes.

ThatRobGuy said:
And it's not a completely unfair characterization (albeit exaggerated a bit by conservative pundits).

Them wedges won’t drive themselves, no.

ThatRobGuy said:
If younger people are coming out of universities heavily indoctrinated with various forms of "theory", and relatively little in terms of how the real world operates, then this clip from "Back to School" highlights the gap.

Kids are graduating college with a world that really isn’t any better then what their parents had…after a century and a half of progress where the next generation had had a hand up by the wealth (and yea, verily, technological advances) generated by the Generation that raised it…it’s “the same” but with more debt; but that’s okay, the Boomers were quite sure that their progeny were going to be up to the task of paying for all those ”tax-cuts” we gave ourselves*.

”Trying something else” will be appealing to people forced to pay for their predecessors’ “mistakes”, using the “current-system”.

*your ‘umble poster is an Ike-years Boomer, “Generation Jones”, after the fashion.

ThatRobGuy · Jun 28, 2026

NxNW said:
A freshman in that comedy movie from 1986 would be 58 now.

I don't think it really supports your point about "younger people".

It does to a degree.

Being knowledgeable about how the real world works would be demonstrated in the form of a person being able to navigate it and operate within it.

If a sizeable chunk of these kids are coming out and being stuck in a position of being unemployed or underemployed, to the degree where "we need our student loans to be forgiven and written off", that seems to be an indicator that there were some serious blind spots regarding the approach.

ThatRobGuy · Jun 28, 2026

Pommer said:
Kids are graduating college with a world that really isn’t any better then what their parents had…after a century and a half of progress where the next generation had had a hand up by the wealth (and yea, verily, technological advances) generated by the Generation that raised it…it’s “the same” but with more debt; but that’s okay, the Boomers were quite sure that their progeny were going to be up to the task of paying for all those ”tax-cuts” we gave ourselves*.

”Trying something else” will be appealing to people forced to pay for their predecessors’ “mistakes”, using the “current-system”.

Is it possible that expectations are different?

The expectations for careers (as well as what people think constitutes middle class) are very different now than they were in the 80's and 90's.

"It has to be something I'm passionate about"
"It has to pay wage good enough to be what I consider middle class"
"It has to be in my locale of choice"

The idea that college (or any other credential) is going to entitle someone to a job that checks all 3 of those boxes is not the norm, and wasn't the norm a few decades back either.

If one is lucky, you get 2 out of the 3 and make a concession on 1 of them.

For what I'm describing, I feel that's evidenced by what a lot of the younger people are going to college to study.

While this is about 5 years old, it still highlights the trend. Look at the number of people per year going in for things like Journalism and Visual and Performing arts.

And when you look at the BLS job trends for some of the fields like that:

Signing up for a $60k loan to be one of the 900,000 people over the next decade vying for 20,000 openings, and then blaming "capitalist greed" when it doesn't pan out and asking for the debt to be forgiven... would be an indicator that there were some very unrealistic expectations going into it.

Mamdani-backed DSA candidate’s win in NYC district leaves residents reeling: ‘No real roots in the neighborhood’

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